Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn't a good place to do it. At TEDxMidwest, he lays out the main problems (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make work work.

Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time.

"Though we've all heard about the good things that come from ambition, laziness gets a bad rap. That's unfortunate. I can attribute a healthy chunk of my success to the positive returns of laziness. Laziness has the best ROI in the business. ... Truth is, things are pretty easy and straightforward -- until you make them hard and complicated."

"As programmers and designers, we often fall in love with our requirements and are unable to kill our darlings. We mistake what we said we’ll do with what must be done. It’s rarely so; you can always do less," says David Heinemeier Hansson.

A wise man once said "We are all at the mercy of our wild monkey minds. Incessantly swinging from branch to branch.” With multiple windows and applications all vying for our attention, we have sadly adapted our working habits to that of the computer and not the other way around.

"I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars. It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable."

"When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule."

You eventually learn that true priorities are like arms; if you think you have more than a couple, you're either lying or crazy. ... Because, if you aren’t rejecting or dumping things every single day, you don’t know your priority. You’re making things up. If you think you have 35 priorities, then yes: you also think you have 35 arms. Is it any wonder you’re feeling awkward and unsure?

We know that our readers are distracted and sometimes even overwhelmed by the myriad distractions that lie one click away on the Internet, but of course writers face the same glorious problem: the delirious world of information and communication and community that lurks behind your screen, one alt-tab away from your word-processor.

Meaningful work is one of the most important things we can impart to children. Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out…

Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content. These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical. ... What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. ... What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything.

The idea of design divorced from engineering is laudable, but the way it so often plays out makes it implausible. ... The two disciplines have to play off each other. One has to influence, guide, and challenge the other. The gulf between what technology is capable of and what we see in the interactive marketplace has to be shortened.